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By Winter Casey, Reporter, BroadbandCensus.com

WASHINGTON, November 10, 2009 - The two government entities charged with distributing $7.2 billion to expand broadband deployment and adoption said Tuesday they are officially seeking public feedback on how to effectively get the funds to the applicants who should be receiving them. The Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the Agriculture Department’s Rural Utilities Service were assigned by Congress in January to administer the program but no awardees have yet to be named. On Tuesday RUS and NTIA said they planned to award the funding in just two rounds to increase efficiency and better accommodate applicants. A statement from the agencies noted that the first round of the grant and loan programs produced about 2,200 applications requesting nearly $28 billion in funding, which is almost seven times the amount of funding available at this time. Though NTIA originally intended to start announcing grant recipients in November, Larry Strickling, head of the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, said in late October that the program has been falling behind. Currently, the agencies do not anticipate announcing the first broadband stimulus grants until at least mid-December but will then announce more awardees on a rolling...

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By the Staff of BroadbandCensus.com

WASHINGTON, November 9, 2009 - BroadbandCensus.com has been investigating broadband stimulus projects and focusing on  the preferred projects from the states. We still lack letters to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration - or notices that states are demanding confidentiality for their letters - from 13 states and territories. The first person to send any letters from the following states will get a complimentary seat at the November 10 Broadband Breakfast Club at Clyde's of Gallery Place at 707 7th Street NW, Washington, DC. The breakfast runs from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m., and the topic is "Setting the Table for the National Broadband Plan: The Environment." Information about the event, and registration, is available at http://broadbandbreakfast.eventbrite.com. BroadbandCensus.com has not recieved either a notice of confidentiality or a copy of the letter from the state to the NTIA from:

• American Samoa
• Arkansas
• Delaware
• District of Columbia
• Guam
• Iowa
• Louisiana
• Mississippi
• New Jersey
• New Mexico
• North Dakota
• Puerto Rico
• Rhode Island

Please send letters to MacRae@BroadbandCensus.com. Here is an up-to-date list of where the other states stand: Confidential or not Public at this time: Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota Northern Mariana Islands, and South Dakota. We have letters from: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas,...

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By Rahul Gaitonde, Reporter, BroadbandCensus.com

WASHINGTON, November 9, 2009 - On Friday, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration announced seven new state recipients of the state broadband data and development grant program. These grants fund state efforts to map broadband availability and speeds. Each state was asked to pick a designated entity – either a state body or a non-profit organization – that would develop a plan for how broadband mapping would be conducted. Of the seven states awarded grants on Friday, two choose to fully internalize their process and have state agencies control the mapping. In Alabama, the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs was tasked; they received $1.4 million for broadband data collection and mapping activities and $463,000 for broadband planning activities both for over a two- year period. In Washington State, the Department of Information Services received $1.7 million for data collection and mapping and almost $500,000 for broadband planning activities both for over a two-year period. Wyoming and Idaho, by contrast, choose to contract their mapping to the Puget Sound Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology, a Seattle based non-profit. Wyoming received $1.3 million for data collection and mapping over a two-year period and $500,000 for broadband planning activities...

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By Andrew Feinberg, Deputy Editor, BroadbandCensus.com

WASHINGTON, November 6, 2009 - The National Cable and Telecommunications Association has asked the Federal Communications Commission to redirect up to $2 billion in "wasteful" spending from Universal Service programs towards broadband. The association did so in a filing submitted to the Commission on Thursday. With telephone subscriber contributions to the program now exceeding 12 percent of total usage fees -- and projected to pass 14 percent next year, it is "critically important" for the FCC to update the program, NCTA said in a press release. "The USF program operates as if nothing has changed since 1996," the association said in its filing. Americans continuous switch away from traditional copper-based phone service negates the need to subsidize it, and funds should be redirected towards the broadband infrastructure carrying Voice over IP traffic which Americans are increasingly choosing. "[A]s millions of Americans take service from facilities-based wireline competitors, the Commission continues to provide billions of dollars of support for [traditional] service." The NCTA suggests the FCC use a two-step process to reassess the level of USF support needed by measuring the availability of cable-based telephone service -- and reducing USF support where it can be shown that competitive service...

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By Winter Casey, Reporter, BroadbandCensus.com

WASHINGTON, November 3, 2009 – Between the government’s slowness in announcing recipients of its broadband stimulus grants and the process of dolling out the funds once the awards have been made, applicants can expect a long wait ahead of them. The Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration, one of the government agencies Congress charged in January with distributing $7.2 billion to expand broadband deployment and adoption, will not announce who will receive the first broadband stimulus grants until at least mid-December, according to an NTIA spokeswoman. The agency then plans to announce more awardees on a rolling basis, she added. The only group that knows for certain that it won’t be getting funds is the controversial ACORN Institute, which describes itself as a group that uses “research and training to address the problems in low-income communities identified through years of community organizing.” Its applications have been deemed "ineligible for funding” by the NTIA. See the listing on NTIA’s Broadbandusa.gov web site. The ACORN Institutes de-funding is the result of guidance issued by the Office of Management and Budget to executive branch agencies cutting off funding to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or...

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WASHINGTON, November 2, 2009 - Stephen Liu, the designer and architect of Cisco System’s myPlanNet and a senior marketing manager at Cisco, discussed the company's new computer game that puts the common man in the shoes of the broadband executive. Edited excerpt of his interview with Winter Casey, Reporter, BroadbandCensus.com, are as follows: Q: What sparked the development of myPlanNet? A: This was actually a result of an internal contest to inspire innovation in marketing. For me, it was a cool and fun way to illustrate just how far the communications have changed over 25 years and how people's lives have shifted as a result. Remember life before cell phones or when you connected to the Internet on demand vs. it just always being on? We had some fun reminiscing on those nostalgic times when creating this. Q: How long has it been in the works? It was released in October, correct? A: This has been a side project for a small team of people at Cisco for about one year. Q: Why did Cisco do the project? Did it by any chance want to get at some of the most pressing issues/debates at the time? A: There are a lot of reasons. For one, it's educational....

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By Winter Casey, Reporter, BroadbandCensus.com

WASHINGTON, November 2, 2009 – Cisco Systems has released a new computer game that puts the common man in the shoes of a broadband executive making deployment decisions. The company’s myPlanNet game attempts to make broadband deployment easy to understand – and perhaps forces broadband activists to walk in the shoes of the network executive grappling with tough issues like the underserved and Net neutrality. As a service provider in Cisco’s myPlanNet, the player manages his or her business as it evolves from the stone ages of dial-up, through the broadband and mobile connected eras, and into what it calls “the dawning of the medianet age.” Liu said the game starts out in 1990 and goes on for 25 years, looking ahead – a bit – into the future six years. The game does not make  an overt attempt to reference the federal government’s broadband stimulus funding – or the national broadband plan currently under development by the Federal Communications Commission. But players – a/k/a broadband service providers – are forced to grapple with thorny questions like network neutrality. “Certainly network neutrality is one of the topics that is addressed in the game,” Stephen Liu, the designer and architect...

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By Rahul Gaitonde, Reporter, BroadbandCensus.com

WASHINGTON, October 30, 2009 – At a Friday workshop that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration held on data collection and the broadband stimulus, NTIA announced that the agency will be collecting large amounts of data through the Census Bureau that they would like to make more broadly available. Researchers and other government agencies will also be using the data collected to create new programs and create predictive models, agency officials said. In addition to gathering data from the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program applications and from maps funded by the broadband stimulus program, NTIA has been able to work with the Census Bureau to add questions to the Current Population Survey as a supplement. The Current Population Survey is one of the largest national surveys conducted by the Census Bureau in conjunction with the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The following five questions are going to be asked:

• Do you/does anyone in this household use the Internet at any location?
• Who is that?
• Do you/does anyone in this household connect to the Internet from home?
• Do you currently access the Internet at home using dial-up or broadband?
• What is the main reason that you do not have high-speed Internet access at home?

At the event...

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